Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut?

This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop “clone” tool to add more smoke to the image. (Hat tip: Mike.)

It’s so incredibly obvious, it reminds me of the faked CBS memos. Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There’s really no question about it.

But it’s not only the plumes of smoke that were “enhanced.” There are also cloned buildings. (See below.)

Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

UPDATE at 8/5/06 5:15:55 pm:

Rob at Left & Right has isolated some repeating elements. Check out his animated GIF showing one section that is very obviously cloned.

Ace has been saying for a week that mainstream media is headed for a major meltdown, by outsourcing so much of their reporting to low-paid foreign stringers with highly questionable loyalties and ethics.

This looks like that meltdown.

UPDATE at 8/5/06 5:32:28 pm:

Here’s another animated GIF I just put together, showing another section that is very obviously duplicated:

And here’s a zoomed-in version of the above cloning example (step back from the monitor for the best view of the effect):

UPDATE at 8/5/06 6:01:37 pm:

Here is a slightly larger (but slightly lower quality) version of the photograph: Reuters Photo.

The photographer who took this picture (probably also the person who doctored it), Adnan Hajj, is rather well-known to LGF readers. In fact, rather well-known to the entire world.

He also took this infamous photograph from Qana of the guy in the green helmet, parading a dead body around for pictures, featured on the front pages of newspapers worldwide: Yahoo! News Photo.

A rescuer carries the body of a toddler victim of an Israeli air raid on Qana that killed more than 60 people, the majority of them women and children, in south Lebanon, July 30, 2006. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj (LEBANON)

UPDATE at 8/5/06 8:11:06 pm:

IMPORTANT!

The possible original for this faked photo has been discovered. And it was taken on July 26, 2006, credited to the Associated Press, by Ben Curtis: Yahoo! News Photo. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

Notice the lower right area of this photo, and compare to lower left of the doctored photo. Notice how all the buildings line up perfectly, including the oddly shaped building on the horizon. I’m putting together another overlay to make it painfully obvious.

UPDATE at 8/5/06 8:33:02 pm:

Here’s the overlay showing the common area of these two photos, clearly cropped from a larger panorama shot.

UPDATE at 8/5/06 9:17:20 pm:

A point to note: regardless of whether you agree that the July 26 photo is cropped from the same panorama shot as today’s (I still think it is), it is still damning evidence — because the one from today shows buildings that don’t exist in the earlier photo, even though they are clearly from the same angle.

Michelle Malkin reminds us of Reuters’ news-gathering policy, from the Reuters website:

“Our policy is to send news to our customers only after scrutiny by a group of production editors who ensure quality standards are maintained across all our news services. When we get something wrong, our policy is to be honest about errors and to correct them promptly and clearly.”

This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go.

Or... you can just click this button to open the Pages posting window right away.

From Sen. Schumer's Facebook page: There are two simple reasons the comparison does not hold water. First, the federal RFRA was written narrowly to protect individuals' religious freedom from government interference unless the government or state had a compelling interest. ...

UPDATE MARCH 30: NEW TIME FOR LIVE STREAM - 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on ...

What's this? Another article on Cracked about how incorrigibly tribal-minded us homo sapiens are? Well, yes. But the proverbial devil is in the proverbial details. Proverbially. It's still worth reading. That's what I'm getting at. Everyone is talking about Scientology ...

China attacks the biggest code repository in the world. After battling a distributed denial of service attack for four days, GitHub on Monday was able to restore normal service levels. The primary target of the assault is greatfire.org, which is ...

An American woman--presumably not Muslim, though she doesn't say one way or the other--married to a Libyan man is taken aback when her 9-year-old daughter suddenly wants to start wearing hijab. This is the story of how conflicted she felt ...

NEW YORK, March 27 (Reuters) - Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, ...

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a ...

Depending on the outcome of a hearing scheduled for Monday, a 33-year-old Indiana woman could face up to 70 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage. Reproductive rights advocates say her case is a disturbing example ...

The number of things getting plugged into the "Internet of Things" has already reached the point of satire. But there's a new, extremely low power technology that's being prepared for market that could put computing power and network access ...

Are conservatives anti-science? Spoiler: Conservatives aren't anti-science or pro-science. But, they are pro-common-sense. And once more scientists adopt common sense approach to science, they'll find that they have the support of conservative politicians - the people whose job it is ...

cracked.com Once the fighting started, a lot of people died, well over a million on our side alone. For the war to continue, a constant stream of new fighters had to join up, and they didn't have the benefit of ...

Here is an interesting article on one of Tail Gunner Joe's sick witch hunts that has, unfortunately, been forgotten. I try not to feel schadenfreude of the fate of McCarthy's side kick, Ray Cohn, but I never succeed.

About the Graphic How should a woman try to get ahead in a male-dominated workplace? Perhaps the answer lies less on women "manning up" and more in how businesses value their employees. Many women confront this tension as they ...

If we accept the idea of Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy, then what does evangelism look like? What is the Witness of those who try to follow the Way of Christ Jesus? To evangelize is to spread the good news that we ...

A short column in The Nation that is a must read. The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn't. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that ...

Blow off Snowden all you like, but what was revealed to be true is still true. The NSA lacks oversight with power. FISA is already too much and now they casually exceed even that generous provision. The world first learned ...

This is a powerful admission of culpability and I applaud his courage in making it. It really should be read in its entirety. Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system ...

Sarah Vine of the DM gets it wrong: SARAH VINE: Teaching 11-year-olds about rape is a form of child abuse The problem with this country, I've come to realise, is that it treats adults like children and children like adults. ...